Seven Mile

Which tld should bite the dust?

http://www.domainersgazette.com/the-dot-what-tld-deathmatch/ 

***FS*** Domainer’s Gazette runs a refreshing poll ..  Should serve as excellent guidance to newbies.

Parking Transparency 

Whizzbang sets out a roadmap for Standards and Transparency for parking companies.

***FS*** I think true transparency is a pipedream absent some kind of leverage on the upstreams.  Nothing begets nothing tho,  so kudos to MG for writing.http://www.whizzbangsblog.com/content/view/333/1/

Elliot Silver interviews Jeremy Padawer.

***FS*** Jeremy is a legacy domainer I remember Chernoff mentioning the guy in the “way early” days ..  today Padawer has a very full time job in the toy industry, and also is quite serious about domain names. He’s been investing in geo names over the last six months. memphis.org, scottsdale.org, rye.com, abilene.org, tempe.org, and others. Josh says: Jeremy is sometimes very funny and outrageous. http://www.elliotsblog.com/index.php/2007/12/03/5-with-jeremy-padawer/

Madison Avenue’s Fear Of Domain Names.

By Stephen Douglas. “The truth of it is that Madison Avenue doesn’t want domains to compete with their abilities as an ad agency and undercut their client’s ad budget. pure and simple.” http://www.successclick.com/madison-avenues-fear-of-domain-names_2007_12_02/

***FS***  I personally think it’s less fear and more ambivalence or lack of understanding..  Most individual names get very little upfront traffic.  We live in an immediate gratification society.. One name 100 visits a day, nothing to get excited about ..  One name plus 12 months building to 10,000 visits a day..  that’s exciting, but it’s also uncertain and far off. Hence,  nothing to get fired-up about on Madison Ave.

Why some early stage startups fail.

***FS***  Valuable lessons here .. Written by someone at UnionSquareVentures.com. Excerpt: “”So it’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed. Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business…. Regardless of whether you have taken venture capital or not, capital efficiency and bootstrapping are critical values. You must keep your burn rate low until you can show without a shadow of a doubt that you have a business model that works, can be operated profitably and is ready to be scaled. Then and only then should you step on the gas.”" http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/11/why_early_stage.html 

.NL Dutch Sedo Auction results.

Prices in Euros:
veiling.nl   ? 46.000
gezondheidszorg.nl   ? 16.500
luik.be   ? 3.500
kerstdagen.nl ? 3.250
hotelgids.nl ? 2.250
(not sure what currency that symbol is.) http://www.domainnews.com/aftermarket/2007120100/sedo-dutch-domain-auction-first-results/

Typo patrol

Someone is doing some pretty comprehensive research in the typo realm. http://www.domaindetectives.net/

Geo Leverage

Stu Maloff uses Geo targetted domains to help build his basketball camp business.  e.g. NewYorkBasketball.com http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2007/dailyposts/12-01-07.htm 

Sport.biz goes for $14,000.

http://insidedomaining.blogspot.com/2007/12/sportbiz-trades-for-10000-euro.html  Josh says: In my opinion, the value of certain strong or very strong single keyword domain names in some of the less popular extensions will continue to rise in value in the long run. One of the obvious reasons is that these kinds of words in .com are simply entirely out of reach for the vast majority of domain investors and people planning to build websites. Some will say that one should go for a two word .com with Sport or Sports in it.  Makes sense.  Some will say that the one word major keyword in a less popular extension is more important to their branding approach.  Makes sense. Personally, i’m not a fan of the way .biz looks or the meaning it has.  Sports.biz would have been much stronger than Sport.biz.The new owner of this domain should also get SportBiz.com, if they haven’t already.

***FS***  I much prefer names like these..  sportsworld.com sportsweb.com ..  certain think names plus ‘world’, ‘web’, ‘net’, ‘biz’ have a generic value and resonance simply because they make sense as generics but have a brandable quality about them. Would rather own those as a .com than own a further afield ext.

Microsoft buys Webfives:

Excerpt: “”The move comes just days after Microsoft took part in a panel discussion on the types of companies it would look to acquire. Managing Director Mark Wolfram had indicated that the Entertainment and Devices area might be ripe for an acquisition.”" http://www.news.com/beyond-binary/8301-13860_3-9827802-56.html?tag=nefd.top

QR Codes. (Quick Response)

QR codes were originally developed by Tokyo-based Denso Wave Inc. and are common in Japan. When published in print form – on billboards, transit ads, vehicles or other media – consumers can then take pictures of the images and have them converted to links, phone numbers or other advertising messages. “The basic function is to eliminate typing and allow you to take a code off paper media and any media that’s printable and transfer it to an electronic form,” said Greg Hayden, chief technology officer for Toronto-based Luna, which is in talks with Canadian carriers – which it will not name – in hopes of making the technology available to Canadian businesses. http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Departmental-and-End-User-Computing/de822e9f-d9c7-49d1-97d2-be7f4d946767.html If i understand this correctly, one could use a symbol or image for one’s domain name, and this could be converted into the actual URL, when a cell phone or PDA user takes a photo of it.  If true, some very interesting possibilities could transpire around this!  This is whatcha call a good idea.

Six Apart sells Live Journal to Sup, a Russian media company.

Be careful how you treat your content contributers. http://valleywag.com/tech/livejournal/six-apart-exiles-its-troublesome-child-to-russia-329031.php

WIPO coming to Canada?

*** From October 17, 2007
http://www.domainnews.com/general/2007113022/the-wipo-is-coming-to-canada/#more-1828
http://www.slyck.com/story1601_Canada_to_Strengthen_Intellectual_Property_Throne_Speech

***FS***  .ca registrants take warning.. WIPO proceedings in general favor the complainant. In no other business do you loose the rights to your property for running afoul of a civil reglation..  it’s par for the course in the domain biz…  for now. 

Sahar gets it on with cars.

http://www.conceptualist.com/2007/12/01/weekend-getway-with-south-florida-toys/

***FS***  Nice to see you enjoying life bro..  It’s short

Tia Gives Some Tips/Tools

http://www.tiawood.com/news/internet-news/free-411-and-other-handy-google-experiments-for-doma.html

***FS***  Some neat tools and assorted domaining good-stuff  ..  Thanks Tia!~

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=203100004

  Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has filed a trademark infringement suit against a California dentist who has registered more than 40 Internet domains with names similar to the software maker’s products or brands. The domains registered by Dr. Saed Said are “identical or confusingly similar” to Microsoft’s trademarks, the company claims in court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California. The domain names registered by Said include aMicrosoftShop.com, aMicrosoftStore.com, XboxOutlet.info, and XboxMarket.mobi.

***FS*** I predict a price increase at this dentist office and(or) extended hours soon.  In my view these are just terrible domain names,  they would get no natural traffic..  They aren’t typos and many folks like this dentist gent truly don’t understand the line of acceptibility relating to trademark style domain names.  I’ve met Microsoft’s IP counsel and he struck me as a pretty fair, decent guy..  so if they’re going after this dentist,  there must be more to the story, resistance to reason, a patern of intentional abuse or something more to have Microsoft go to court over it..

Longtime readers of this blog will know my view that Microsoft’s policy of taking over trademark intent search strings and unresolving domains in it’s browser do not help our space, because it highlights an incredibly hypocritical double-standard relating to what is correct and acceptable behavior.  Forbidding cybersquatters from registering domain names like aMicrosoftShop.com while permiting Microsoft to take over aGoogleshop.xom, .dom or .cpm in its browser is just not reasoned or balanced..  It’s bad form and glares of unfairness..  I am not condoning cybersquatting, but would be a much bigger Microsoft supporter if they stopped stealing obvious domain extension mistypes in their browser’s address-bar while attacking those who they view as stealing from it. A little fairness balance and equity goes a long way to building good-will.  Esp. since this inequity is so bold faced, glaring obvious.. (insert your adjective here) to any fair minded person.

http://blog.snipperoo.com/2007/11/death-of-the-do.html

  Summary:  A guy who could have bought billions of dollars worth of domain real estate by applying his foresight (but didn’t) now declares “domain names dead” and hypothesizes that we will abandon domain names in favor of Rube Goldberg inspired Universal Search Locators (USLs) which will take over as the foundational elements of the web.. 

While I could actually see some variant of this trying to marginalize domains in the next 50 years,  in the end I think the obstacles are so many and the challenges so daunting that nothing could actually “do away” with the usefulness of domain names.  Consider:

—You would need to have Google agree on a global standard with Microsoft, Yahoo, Sina, Baidu and all other competing search services so that the experience of USL’s is uniform. You wouldn’t want to type Snipperoo at Baidu and get to Widgettown instead.

 —Even if you got everybody to agree on a standard you wouldn’t have mail because email runs on domain names.  This chap would surely argue that we could all abandon our email in favor of search engine messengers.. but those would have to run on a globally universal standard too.

— After clearing the initial hurdles above, you’d just have to convince every existing site owner to adopt your new platform and abandon their trillions on global collective branding in domains (think of every business card, bus bench, billboard, TV commercial, directory you’d have to change)

— You’d have to persuade governments of the world to cast away their national heritage embodied in (CCtlds)

— You’d have to convince Verisign to roll over and play dead.. or just buy them.. ditto with PIR (.org) and Affilias..

— Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari would have to give up their browsers because we wouldn’t need them.

It’s funny to read posts like this because search engines actually search for domain names.. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Without a name there is nothing to search for  

In fact it would be easier to just buy all the available domain names from large name holders around the world..  a few billion would roll up 60% of the most visited sites on the net.

Quote: “”The idea here is that as your content is broken up and thown out into the four corners of the web, that is where you come to reside. You no longer have a central address, you only exist where you end up. If you are good, you end up in some very powerful places. If you are bad – well, we all know what happens on the web if you are bad.”"

Those “Places” will need to have a unique location of course..  There is no such thing as a “place” without a unique location..  and on the Internet you need a Domain name to have a unique location – unless you want to start typing-in IP numbers that is.

This guy needs to lay of the over the counter cold medication.  Sahar calls bullshit too..  Next.

 Dr. John Berryhill takes us on a brief turn down memory lane and posits on the potential ‘tit for tat’ relating to the hijacking of user intent:

 “”Recall that when Sitefinder was operating, there was a BIND patch (put out by Vixie?) that would detect Verisign’s synthesized DNS results and “re-fix” them as NXDOMAIN.

So, you now have the stage set for a genuine tug-of-war over DNS results.

Move 1:  Verisign turns Sitefinder back on thus “trumping” Verizon.

Move 2:  Verizon counters by looking at DNS results coming back with Sitefinder IP addresses, and “takes back” those addresses, re-pointing to
Verizon Superpages.

Moves 3 and 4 can go in a couple of directions.  You also have to take into account the browser people, and their take/reaction to all of this.

For example,

Move 3:  MS patches IE to detect either Verizon or Verisign shenanigans, and points the browser to MSN Live Search.  Mozilla does the same thing, and points Firefox to Google.

Move 4:  Everyone decides that as long as DNS result tinkering is “fair game”, they all configure their systems to screw over domain registrants doing PPC the old-fashioned way.

Move 5:  “The Internet” becomes Compuserve circa 1996.

The somewhat amusing collateral upshot is that Verizon and Verisign – as Internet advertising service providers – finally get to square off on whose trademark is confusingly similar to whose (if anyone is keeping score on my “bold predictions”).”"

***FS*** This Verizon thing is just bad.  A common-carrier – a modern utility really.. placed in a position of great power, with great responsibility, taking over user intent and hijacking the browsing experience on a wholesale level for financial ends.  This type of unfair competition sets a poor example for others in similar positions of authority to follow.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ah_myY3uN0pE&refer=home

I am consistently dumbstruck that deals like this barely raise an eyebrow, while individual domain names, the foundational elements of the Internet, get compared to tulip manias and bubbles.

It’s a strange upside down world we live in.. Domain name monetization has been going on in much the same way since adult webmasters began selling monthly memberships to porn sites in 1995 (3 years after the birth of the modern web browser) ..  Today we have paid search monetization sites for virtually every product and service under the sun. Many are moving away from straight parking toward lead generation, arbitrage, content delivery and pay-per-unique implementations.

But these simple sites which for years have made money in the most benign of ways are ‘bubbles’ while the publicly listed internet economy, consisting of plates spinning on the ends of pool cues is accepted as foundationally sound and airtight.

All a fellow can do is smile, shrug and keep cashing those checks. It’s too tiring and unproductive to pen a counterpoint to each person who don’t understand.. or who doesn’t want to understand.

Suffice it to say that the Internet has already crashed and burned once ..  domain names did not experience that shock..  If there is a redux of 2000/2001 you can expect domain names to perform in a similar manner as before.

I’m not so sure all of Facebook’s 15 Billion will come out the same way.

Ballmer used to say Linux is a cancer.

http://www.news.com:80/8301-10784_3-9800141-7.html?tag=nefd.only

I had the weirdest dream last night..  weird for several reasons. Firstly, I don’t usually dream about the domain business (that I can remember) and they certainly don’t wake me from my sleep at 4AM.

In this dream I was in New York, during some kind of conference and was meeting with Rupert Murdoch about a strategic merger..  A faceless female assistant or key staff-member (who is a mutual acquaintance in said dream) had arranged to bring Rupert by my hotel suite as he made his way to some other meeting. In the office of the suite we talked about the domain name business, how domain name traffic powers part of Google, Yahoo and drives a significant portion of generic-intenet Internet traffic.. Rupe tried to get his head around the concept that many of the companies he had bought and invested in had domain name underpinnings. He was quite clever, savvy and aware of things in my dream.

As much as I wanted to take this meeting to talk shop with today’s William Randolph Hearst, Rupert had somehow heard of me (and the domain industry) and he wanted to take the meeting as well! It wasn’t a love-fest meeting though. Rupert was the classic 2002 era skeptic.. He wanted to talk about charts and projections through 2012. He seemed hurried, synopsizing the domain industry’s highlights and playing devils advocate, talking about fragmented interests and the difficulty of uniting a scatter-shot domain audience around a cohesive core or brand. It didn’t seem like I was going to sell Mr. Murdoch on the benefits of merging a large domain network with his media content core.

I had several browser windows open during our discussion and suddenly, as we were in the wrap-up phase of our conversation (Rupert had his coat over his arm and umbrella in hand) it occurred to me to resize two of the open browser windows on my laptop…

What would happen if every time somebody typed one of our potent domain names they received a single split-screen of targeted paid search advertising, married to a relevant Newscorp media content page?  Type a cooking name and get a relevant food story from today’s Newscorp newspaper…  Type Sportscores.com and get ads coupled with the sports section of Foxnews..  Type PersonalLoans.com and get a split-screen with related content from the WSJ..   Rupert’s eye’s lit up.  I explained how a mash-up of my traffic with his rotating content could turn the 30 million unique visitors we get each month into 60 or 100 million as people came back for more. Then we could ramp up our own Domain Sponsor style third-party syndication business to augment our own proprietary traffic with other domainer’s traffic; making Newscorp websites the most visited on the Internet in about 6 months.

Rupert started talking about creating his own ad marketplace and the mechanics of our proposed merger when it suddenly occurred to me that I had already signed a deal to be sold to a less strategic company for hundreds of millions of dollars less than Rupert was offering..  Then I woke up… That’s what you call a ‘high-class nightmare’ folks

I jotted down a few notes so I could remember to blog about it then went back to another dream about the playboy mansion.

It was the implementation in the Murdoch dream that still resonated the morning after. The content exists today..  the domain name networks exist today.. They are an invisible traffic source, generating hundreds of millions of unique visits a month globally.  How could Newscorp or another media content house elevate it’s Internet presence and exert control over Google by injecting itself as a domain name network owner/sub-syndicator and marrying content to each and every page load?

Lawrence Ng should have a ‘frank’ conversation with Rupert’s people

Danno sends spicy headline and link:

""FYI…July 17

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39167861,00.htm?r=1

Best,
Dan"""

***FS*** The way I see it Microsoft / IE have two choices.  They can clean up their act (browser) and stop gaming people’s navigational intent via BS takeovers of your/my traffic to their "Live" property (this basically goes to improving the usefulness of their browser) .. or they can gradually perish as people like you,  I, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others work against them to undermine their position.  Nobody would work against them if they were delivering a better product or running a clean show.  If they choose the latter,  I expect even more nefariousness and acts of dsesperation as they go down at an accelerated pace.  Serious serious prediction.

This is what I was talking about in question 9 on Aaron’s blog; and recently when I wrote this post speaking to ‘TLD platform leverage’ .. the kinds of things that could ultimately rival or challenge the .com extension..

It seems I’m not the only one who’s found his way to the Caribbean, Microsoft has invaded Monserrat!: http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/get-your-own-microsoft-domain-today/

Why is this important? Imagine if every Microsoft employee had email that looked like this: Bill@microsoft.ms .. an internal corporate account with a TLD extension that clearly identified the corporation. Microsoft would have to share with fellow Montserratians of course, but Google could push for the .goog extension and keep it for their tens of thousands of employees.. Sergey@google.goog would signify that you had reached Google.  No need to worry about cybersquatters out in the .com world..  let them do what they want there because only authorized people would get accounts or sites on .goog.

Quote from story: "How long before Microsoft sues to own the .MS tld and everything on it? (all your base are belong to us, anyone?)"

The bigger question in my mind is: How long before Google applies for .goog, IBM for .ibm, Coca cola for .coke ..and so on until every major global corporation has their own GTLD. Leaving .com to the mom and pops, generic holders and cybersquatters? It would take a generation to get traction globally, but it could "come to be" on the back of baby-steps like this.

Quote:  "You can purchase your own .MS domain name here; and just for kicks, check out http://google.ms/ Funnily enough, Microsoft.ms doesn’t load, and MSN.ms doesn’t even exist. Interesting…

Didn’t get Microsoft.ms huh?.. And promoting the extension as part of a product!!?   Okay, okay..  so maybe I overestimated these Microsoft guys. Google on the other hand,  not so dumb registering www.google.ms

http://blogs.business2.com/sloan/2007/05/why_microsofts_.html

Paul Sloan doesn’t blog too often so when I see his blog update,  it’s worth mentioning. Paul adds additional color to the 6Billion purchase of Aquantive.

Quote: "the point of this deal (and the point of Google buying DoubleClick, for that matter) is that it’s no longer about search vs. display. The lines are blurring, … Aquantive knows, for instance, that certain banner ads make people more likely to search using certain keywords…  Microsoft,  for example, should be able to tell a car advertiser running a display ad for a sports car exactly what keywords it should buy for its paid search campaign — maybe "red cars" or "fast cars," and so on."

Hmmm ..  still sounds like ‘not a lot of fireworks’ for 6 billion.